Surgeries & procedures

Other surgeries

Appendix removal is a surgical procedure, either through keyhole surgery or open surgery. The data presented here relate to patients who stayed one or more nights for the removal of the appendix without complications, malignant cancer or peritonitis.

Appendix removal: average length of stay

In 2011–12 there were too few patients to allow calculation of this indicator.

Gallbladder removal, or cholecystectomy, is a surgical procedure generally performed to treat a patient for gallstones. The data presented here relate to patients who had their gallbladder removed using keyhole surgery and who stayed one or more nights without complications.

Gallbladder removal: average length of stay

In 2011–12, there were a total of 41 stays for gallbladder removal, of which 100% were overnight stays.

General surgery focuses on the organs of the abdomen (such as the stomach, intestines, gall bladder, liver and pancreas), and includes hernia repair and haemorrhoid removal. General surgeons may also treat diseases of the skin and breast.

All general surgery: median waiting times

In 2012–13, the median waiting time for general surgery was 17 days at this hospital.

Varicose vein ligation and stripping: percentage of patients who waited longer than 365 days

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Average length of stay for selected conditions

These pages present length of stay information for a selected group of conditions and procedures. These conditions were chosen by a group of clinical experts and patient representatives to provide a mix of high volume surgical and medical conditions. Conditions and procedures are identified using the Australian Refined Diagnosis Related Group (AR-DRG) system.

Most hospitals now use electronic records to store information about patients for whom they provide care. These patient record systems are based around a patient's episode of care, a technical term for a period in hospital that ends in patient discharge, death, transfer to another hospital or a change in the type of care received e.g. from receiving surgery to replace an arthritic knee (acute care) to being transferred to part of the hospital that provides rehabilitation care. The end of an episode of care is referred to as a 'separation'. For the purposes of reporting on this website, episodes of care are referred to as 'stays'.

These pages present the following length of stay information:

Total number of stays: the total number of episodes of care for this AR-DRG

Percentage of overnight stays: the percentage of episodes of care for this AR-DRG that had a stay of one or more nights in hospital

Number of overnight stays: the number of episodes of care for one or more nights

Total overnight patient bed days: the sum of all bed days for patients who stayed one or more nights for this condition or procedure

Average length of stay: this is the average (mean) length of stay (in days) for patients who stayed one or more nights for this condition or procedure

Comparison to peer group: for each AR-DRG, this figure compares the average length of stay for this hospital to the average length of stay of all similar hospitals (its peer group). This provides context for this hospital's average length of stay by contrasting it to the most comparable group of public hospitals.

Information is presented for financial years starting 1 July and ending 30 June.

Calculation of measures

Average length of stay for selected conditions or procedures

The following exclusions are applied when calculating all results on these webpages:

Stays for non-acute care

Stays where the patient died

Stays where the patient was transferred to another health care facility within two days.

In addition, a small number of exceptionally long stays were excluded using statistical methods.

Peer groups

Peer groups allow hospitals to be compared to other similar hospitals. This minimises the effect of different hospital size, service provision and rurality when comparing hospitals.

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Elective (planned) surgery median waiting times

Number of surgeries

Indicator

Number of elective surgeries

About the indicator

The number of surgeries reported is the number of hospital admissions for elective (planned) surgery. Data are reported for each elective surgery urgency category; urgent (within 30 days), semi-urgent (within 90 days) and non-urgent (within 365 days).

Counts of less than 5 surgeries are not reported to protect patients' privacy.

Specification

To see more about this measure view the data specification for this indicator on Australia's metadata online registry, METeOR.

Median waiting times

Indicator

Median waiting times for elective surgery (days)

About the indicator

The median waiting time is the number of days within which half of people received their planned urgent (within 30 days), semi-urgent (within 90 days) and non-urgent (within 365 days); the remaining half waited longer than the median waiting time for surgery.

Results are not shown where the number of surgeries is less than 10.

Specification

To see more about this measure view the data specification for this indicator on Australia's metadata online registry, METeOR.